Ava Labs explores backup cryptography to address AI security risks

Ava Labs: Ava Labs is the company responsible for developing and maintaining the Avalanche blockchain protocol. Its founder and CEO Emin Gün Sirer remains in leadership following a September 2026 organizational reshuffle that included new appointments in president and CFO roles. The firm is actively preparing Avalanche for emerging security challenges by exploring alternative cryptographic approaches. Avalanche: Avalanche is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain protocol developed by Ava Labs that supports customizable subnets and parallel execution. It recently introduced Continuous Execution upgrades to enhance efficiency through better parallelism. In response to AI-driven security concerns, the protocol is investigating backup cryptography and hash-based signature schemes. Emin Gün Sirer: Emin Gün Sirer is the founder and CEO of Ava Labs and a key figure in the development of the Avalanche blockchain. On October 9, 2026, he publicly stated that AI systems are more likely to exploit software bugs in crypto wallets, libraries, and code than to break the ECDSA algorithm itself. His comments underscore the need for proactive cryptographic diversification in blockchain networks. Post-Quantum Preparation: Blockchain teams are assessing hash-based signature schemes as independent backups to lattice-based post-quantum standards to ensure cryptographic diversity. AI-Driven Security Analysis: Recent discussions highlight how advanced AI models can detect subtle flaws in complex blockchain software that human audits may overlook.